Evil And Corruption At Heart Of 'Madness'

February 26, 1986|By Reviewed by Dan Cryer, Newsday

A Family Madness, Thomas Keneally's outstanding new novel, explores two worlds of evil: Nazi-occupied Belorussia during World War II and contemporary Australia. That one does not immediately associate the land of sun, surf and cute koalas with evil does not matter. Through the deftest artistry, Keneally forces us to see his native land as a kind of occupied territory of the spirit, a land in which evil can corrupt the most settled, the most commonplace relationships.

In the first world, Stanislaw Kabbelski, a provincial police chief and Belorussian nationalist, struggles to gain independence for his tiny Baltic principality, fated to be forever a pawn between Poland and Russia. Like much of Eastern Europe held by the Nazis, Belorussia has become a killing ground for Jews, and Kabbelski, a committed Jew-hater, does not hesitate to collaborate in the massacres. He would kill Jews on his own; all the better that he can use collaboration to forward his nationalistic aims.

The second world centers on one of life's little guys, Terry Delaney, a security guard and part-time professional rugby player. Terry is married to Gina, but rugby is his passion. If only he could make it to the big leagues of rugby, his life in the Sydney suburbs might take on the luster to which he feels entitled. He is not a bad fellow, but his life is mean enough and boring enough to make him prey to the sort of adventure that too easily turns to disaster.

The book's link between these worlds is Stanislaw Kabbelski's son, Radislaw, a Belorussian living in Australia who goes by the name of Rudi Kabbel. Rudi operates a security agency, and he is as security-obsessed as if he were a Holocaust survivor instead of the son of a war criminal. Severely scarred by his boyhood experience, he has become a man whose intellectual brilliance has been twisted into monomania.

When Terry loses his job, Rudi hires him (and buddy Brian Stanton) and so exposes the young man to his apocalyptic view of a world in decay and to his daughter. Danielle is as intelligent and mysterious as her father and her brothers Warwick and Scott. She also proves to be too tempting for Terry to resist. Never mind that he is devoutly Catholic and supposedly devoutly married.

As chapters of A Family Madness alternate between present and past, Keneally varies the point of view as well. He lets Kabbelski the elder tell his part of the story through his wartime diaries (discovered by Rudi's sister Genia and passed along to Rudi only in 1982) and through Rudi's explanatory gloss on them. The most sensational revelations, glimpsed by the reader only at book's end, come in Genia's accompanying letter to Rudi.

Delaney's more prosaic story is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator. Thus we get the occasional ironic commentary: ''Stanton was to Delaney an example of how a life could be destroyed by an unlucky passion. Delaney intended to suffer no such unlucky passion in his own life.''

It's quite a balancing act to bring such different worlds to life in the same book, but Keneally achieves it brilliantly. His major characters are evoked with the sureness of a master. And with just a few revealing strokes he creates extraordinarily authentic minor characters, including a with-it priest who is a closet gay and an SS commander too gentle for his own good.

Kabbelski's tone is flat and unapologetic as he reports on the killing of Jews and the political maneuvers on behalf of his would-be nation. It is a cold and remorseless world view that his son inherits. As Rudi observes:

''Sometimes, Mr. Delaney, history does make its claim on people. In places like Los Angeles and Sydney people try to live in an eternal and very base now, without any memory of the dead. The barbecue and the sun are all . . . But you have to face it: sometimes even history can't be avoided, history comes up and grabs people.''

In Keneally's reading, history will grab both of these very different men. For Kabbel, history condemns him to interpret the present in light of a haunted past. For Delaney, that past is extended to him in the form of Danielle, who charges his more limited world with equal parts excitement and peril.

In the end, Keneally makes us understand that in the cruel and ironic intersection of Kabbelski's criminality and Delaney's everyday torments lies a good deal of common ground. The politician is at home with the banality of evil; he serves a larger good, he believes, by going along with Nazi crimes. For Delaney the working stiff, banality is the evil he wishes to transcend, but he passes only into another banal world: the midnight tryst at seedy motels.

Make no mistake: A Family Madness is no philosophical treatise but a pleasure to read, a richly conceived and eloquently executed novel.